Essays: Are we meant to be good or bad people?
Context: The “mirror”
Welcome, travelers! I opened my blog featuring a unique fireplace with burning embers that can be rekindled again and again. As I build a wonderful home for you, I am adding in various furniture, rooms and decorations to make your stay a pleasant one. These things are designed with my ideas for your well-being in mind, so do expect that I may not be able to fulfil every last request you have. I would like to introduce you to the entrance by asking yourself to look into the mirror beside the door. Look at yourself and ask, “Who am I? What do I want from myself?”
One common theme that emerges from this self-questioning is whether we are good or bad people. We will now go into the world of the mirror, exploring various parallel universes that reflect the many different sides of you. As these sides unfold, we are constantly contemplating the question of “How should we think about our morality?”
The short answer is: it is your call and nobody can decide for you. Our environment and emotions play a large role in our behaviour, possibly even more so than our personal beliefs. The studies of ethics and social psychology are just starting to uncover all these factors.
For instance, research suggests that when learning about a person’s moral character, bad behavior weighs more heavily on our impressions than good behavior. However, when learning about a person’s abilities, achievement is more informative than failure. Much of this knowledge is influenced by the research of psychologists like Susan Fiske, John Skowronski and Donal Carlston, and Bogdan Wojciszke. Studies like these suggest that the reason for this is that we are more used to people exhibiting moral behaviour than what they would do otherwise, so our brain tends to think that bad behaviour is more revealing of a person’s true character. To change an initial bad impression of someone, that person doing an act of kindness that anybody else can easily does not cut it, so that change must come from an action that is highly unusual. These biases stem from the way our brains process information from our surroundings.
Our relationship with morality
To avoid losing ourselves over the subjectivity of this “ethical being” debate, we turn to neuroscience in an attempt to “open up” the brain to see how it works inside.
Obviously, defining what is good and bad is highly complex. There are moral dilemmas that challenge the values that we are taught as young children. One example of this is the teaching that we must be honest and remain loyal to the people who we serve (such as our superiors). However, what if we were asked a sensitive question about our superior by someone who was at odds with the said superior? Being honest and coming clean with the truth might mean being disloyal to our superior, whom we most likely have signed a contract with and are bound by law to not spill any confidential information.
Nevertheless, we can rely on scientific studies to find out the nature of humans’ morality, and why we do certain moral and immoral things.
Some studies suggest that we are naturally altruistic creatures
Studies have shown that people naturally tend to act out of kindness.
Research conducted by Yale University (puppet show) and Harvard University (Big Mother) involving babies have shown that babies recognise kind acts even if the actions are done by creatures looking totally different from humans and most would want to support the “kind” creatures.
Researchers also claim that beyond empathy and a sense of morality, altruism may be hardwired in the brain, and we may be able to encourage more altruistic behavior. The more we tend to vicariously experience the states of others, the more we appear to be inclined to treat them as we would ourselves.
Blocking parts of the brain responsible for impulse control (whether those impulses are positive or negative) also lead to more altruistic behavior, suggesting that our innate impulses are good, not bad.
The evolutionary and developmental history of humankind might offer a stronger argument for why we tend to see helping others and being selfless as being desirable, and engage in such behaviour.
Swiss anthropologists conducted research on various animal species, including humans, to test out the cooperative breeding hypothesis in explaining altruistic (being kind enough to help others in need) behaviour. This hypothesis was proposed by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, now an anthropologist emeritus at the University of California, Davis, in the late 1990s. From the results of the research, the degree to which a species engaged in cooperative breeding showed a correlation to the likelihood of that species displaying altruistic behaviour toward others.
According to Hrdy’s model, early in their evolution humans added cooperative breeding behaviors to their already existing advanced ape cognition, leading to a powerful combination of smarts and sociality that fueled even bigger brains, the evolution of language, and unprecedented levels of cooperation.
It turned out that humans needed to be nice to each other for the most part so that they could survive. For much of human history, there was a lot of cooperation, and much fussing over what kind of behaviour was tolerable in a societal context. This kind of behaviour could help people gain more resources that were not easily found in their respective communities, and people could also muster the strength they need to take down the most violent, dominant guy at the top of the social hierarchy,
Through many such cooperative behaviours, technology and large scale projects like agriculture were able to be carried out, and people could build on the experiences of others who were with them or came before them to improve existing technology, bringing more improvements to their quality of life. Many amazing things we rely on a daily basis, such as electricity and the Internet, came out of such cooperativeness. With the world becoming more globalised and interconnected, we are relying more on each other to fulfil our daily needs. For instance, by ourselves, it is really hard to be able to get food for a nutritionally balanced diet unless we buy and trade things for them with others, for it would be more efficient to grow the foods in the best environments before they would be distributed via the economics of the market and trade. Being totally self-sustainable does not make much sense in today’s world. Like it or not, it is within our best interests to care for and be there for one another.
How about humans being evil innately? There is some evidence for that too
Delroy Paulhus is one of the scientists trying to unravel the evilness of humans. He seeks answers for the question of why people take pleasure in cruelty. Some of the bad personality traits that account for the dark side of people include:
Observations and questionnaires were done to find out more about these dark traits. A pattern that seemed to emerge over his findings is the need for fulfilling basic desires, such as validating our own beliefs and experiencing pleasure linked to various immoral behaviour.
People who score particularly high on narcissism, for instance, quickly display their tendency to “over-claim” - one of the strategies that helps them boost their own egos. There is a psychological phenomenon that describes that. It has been dubbed the Lake Wobegon Effect after the fictional town where ‘all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average’. Ironically, the least skilled among us are the most prone to overconfidence. Also known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it happens because we do not know enough about a task to accurately assess our ability, and we have not experienced enough about the task to make us have second thoughts about our abilities.
Ignorance and how it takes away the feeling of being socially connected with others is a scary drive. Another case study of basic desires leading to cruel acts are about sadistic people. A bug-crushing experiment revealed that everyday sadists may have more muted emotional responses to all kinds of pleasurable activities, so perhaps their random acts of cruelty are attempts to break through the emotional numbness.
The ego might also account for another cognitive trap that we face often: the action-observer asymmetry. This is how it works: in a situation where a person experiences something negative, the individual will often blame the situation or circumstances. When something negative happens to another person, people will often blame the individual for their personal choices, behaviors, and actions.
One possible reason is that when people are the actors in a situation, they cannot see their own actions. When they are the observers, however, they are easily able to observe the behaviors of other people. Because of this, people are more likely to consider situational forces when attributing their own actions (which they might take more to heart), yet focus on internal characteristics when explaining other people's behaviors. That is why those under this misattribution would feel that everyone and everything else, except for oneself, were wrong.
Other than ignorance and the ego, being able to avoid taking responsibility for one’s own actions could also be another driving force of bad behaviour. The subservience to authority could lead to the doing of cruel acts. This had been an issue that was brought to the public view during war crimes trials such as the perpetrators behind horrific genocides, with some of the most famous examples including the Nuremberg Trials.
Many of those tried, in their defence, had said that they were pressured to do so under orders and they did what they were told in order to survive. Several of the Nazis on trial unsuccessfully attempted to cite Befehlsnotstand, a German legal idea that one was exempt from justice if they committed the acts under orders. However, the law cannot accept that as an excuse. This is hard doctrine, and it is because such a recognition not only would leave the structure of society at the mercy of criminals of sufficient ruthlessness, but also would place the cornerstone of justice on the quicksand of self-interest. Basically, in the wider public interest, self-preservation cannot cover up for one’s immoral actions. It was accepted the way the law should be, no matter how unfair it may sound to some people.
Such a behaviour trait had also been demonstrated through research like what the Milgram experiment sought to do - among the experiment’s participants, who were given the instructions from an authority figure to apply an electric shock to someone, many of them applied the highest voltage, especially when they were not able to see whoever they shocked.
Where should we stand on the fine line between the good and bad?
We know that there is much research showing that humans are predisposed to both sides of the extreme in terms of moral and immoral behaviour. However, we are not helpless. Even in the research, the occurrence of moral and immoral acts were presented as a possibility. It is not a given that we would fall into these experimental scenarios and go by the same behaviour.
Humans are not perfect creatures, and our brains are not the most perfect moral agents, but we can continue to make conscious choices to avoid making lapses in moral judgments and to live as uprightly as we can hope to be.
We have the agency to deliberate our actions, even in situations where we could be under a lot of pressure.
For instance, back to the previous example of Milgram’s experiment, the findings also showed that people’s susceptibility to following instructions from an authority is not inevitable. Resistance to an authority figure is possible. This fact had been reinforced through other studies replicating Milgram’s experiment. Those who resisted prioritised their empathy with the victim more than their loyalty to the instructor, citing that the one receiving electric shocks were in pain, and seemed unconvinced that the instruction was justified.
Another example of this resistance was led to the sparing of the world from a nuclear armageddon. In 1983, during the Cold War, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov decided to dismiss the warning system which detected an American nuclear strike as a false alarm, and did not order a nuclear retaliation, which would be catastrophic for millions of people. It was a costly decision for Petrov. If he had been wrong, and he somehow survived the American nuclear strike, he likely would’ve been executed for treason. Even though he was right, he was, according to the Washington Post’s David Hoffman, “relentlessly interrogated afterward [and] never rewarded for his decision.” From this, we could see that humans could have the capability to not entirely dismiss the greater good for their own self-preservation.
Also, we need a more nuanced view of actions that seem to be hostile or immoral. Delroy Paulhus, while in search of answers explaining humans’ cruelty, was excited about new work on “moral Machiavellianism” and “communal narcissists” – people who perhaps have dark traits but use them for good (as they see it).
In some situations, ruthlessness may be necessary. “To be prime minister, you can’t be namby pamby – you need to cut corners and hurt people, and even be nasty to achieve your moral causes,” he says. After all, the dark personalities often have the impulse and the confidence to get things done –even Mother Teresa apparently had a steely side, he says. “You’re not going to help society by sitting at home being nice.”
This would become more relevant today as we see world leaders mull over tough decisions. To continue with draconian movement restrictions or to risk the proliferation of the virus responsible for an ongoing global pandemic? To preserve the status quo for an immediate improvement in people’s living standards or to curb economic development appropriately to make way for greener policies before the world would be pushed to the brink of collapse by climate change? All of these involved hard decisions and sacrifices. With our resources being so limited, and with so many conflicting self-interests, it is extremely difficult to push our way forward in the midst of all the hubris and come up with a win-win solution.
With so many people telling us what to do, and with much misinformation swamped online, the world would become a better place if people were not too quick to act for issues at the larger societal context, such as race, gender, politics, religion, rights, ex-offenders, cultural groups, et cetera, and would take a moment to think critically and decide how to put their best foot forward and inspire positive change.
It may not be challenging to resist against another person, but what about ourselves, specifically the entrenched intrinsic bias that we were not always aware of? Bias cannot be avoided, we just can't help ourselves. Research shows that we apply different standards when we compare men and women. While explicit discrimination certainly exists, perhaps the more arduous task is to eliminate our implicit biases — the ones we don't even realise we have. However, we can design our means to work around these biases.
In the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras began using blind auditions, which were designed to eliminate bias against women. Candidates are situated on a stage behind a screen to play for a jury that cannot see them. In some orchestras, blind auditions are used just for the preliminary selection while others use it all the way to the end, until a hiring decision is made. Even when the screen is only used for the preliminary round, it has a powerful impact; researchers have determined that this step alone makes it 50% more likely that a woman will advance to the finals. And the screen has also been demonstrated to be the source of a surge in the number of women being offered positions.
Whether we are good or bad beings are not set in stone. Even if we could be defined in some ways by our birth and our genes, our minds are plastic and are capable of changing their personalities and thought patterns. We need more awareness and kindness to understand what is affecting our decisions and use that knowledge to empower ourselves to be a positive influence in other’s lives.
Context: The “mirror”
Welcome, travelers! I opened my blog featuring a unique fireplace with burning embers that can be rekindled again and again. As I build a wonderful home for you, I am adding in various furniture, rooms and decorations to make your stay a pleasant one. These things are designed with my ideas for your well-being in mind, so do expect that I may not be able to fulfil every last request you have. I would like to introduce you to the entrance by asking yourself to look into the mirror beside the door. Look at yourself and ask, “Who am I? What do I want from myself?”
One common theme that emerges from this self-questioning is whether we are good or bad people. We will now go into the world of the mirror, exploring various parallel universes that reflect the many different sides of you. As these sides unfold, we are constantly contemplating the question of “How should we think about our morality?”
The short answer is: it is your call and nobody can decide for you. Our environment and emotions play a large role in our behaviour, possibly even more so than our personal beliefs. The studies of ethics and social psychology are just starting to uncover all these factors.
For instance, research suggests that when learning about a person’s moral character, bad behavior weighs more heavily on our impressions than good behavior. However, when learning about a person’s abilities, achievement is more informative than failure. Much of this knowledge is influenced by the research of psychologists like Susan Fiske, John Skowronski and Donal Carlston, and Bogdan Wojciszke. Studies like these suggest that the reason for this is that we are more used to people exhibiting moral behaviour than what they would do otherwise, so our brain tends to think that bad behaviour is more revealing of a person’s true character. To change an initial bad impression of someone, that person doing an act of kindness that anybody else can easily does not cut it, so that change must come from an action that is highly unusual. These biases stem from the way our brains process information from our surroundings.
Our relationship with morality
To avoid losing ourselves over the subjectivity of this “ethical being” debate, we turn to neuroscience in an attempt to “open up” the brain to see how it works inside.
Obviously, defining what is good and bad is highly complex. There are moral dilemmas that challenge the values that we are taught as young children. One example of this is the teaching that we must be honest and remain loyal to the people who we serve (such as our superiors). However, what if we were asked a sensitive question about our superior by someone who was at odds with the said superior? Being honest and coming clean with the truth might mean being disloyal to our superior, whom we most likely have signed a contract with and are bound by law to not spill any confidential information.
Nevertheless, we can rely on scientific studies to find out the nature of humans’ morality, and why we do certain moral and immoral things.
Some studies suggest that we are naturally altruistic creatures
Studies have shown that people naturally tend to act out of kindness.
Research conducted by Yale University (puppet show) and Harvard University (Big Mother) involving babies have shown that babies recognise kind acts even if the actions are done by creatures looking totally different from humans and most would want to support the “kind” creatures.
Researchers also claim that beyond empathy and a sense of morality, altruism may be hardwired in the brain, and we may be able to encourage more altruistic behavior. The more we tend to vicariously experience the states of others, the more we appear to be inclined to treat them as we would ourselves.
Blocking parts of the brain responsible for impulse control (whether those impulses are positive or negative) also lead to more altruistic behavior, suggesting that our innate impulses are good, not bad.
The evolutionary and developmental history of humankind might offer a stronger argument for why we tend to see helping others and being selfless as being desirable, and engage in such behaviour.
Swiss anthropologists conducted research on various animal species, including humans, to test out the cooperative breeding hypothesis in explaining altruistic (being kind enough to help others in need) behaviour. This hypothesis was proposed by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, now an anthropologist emeritus at the University of California, Davis, in the late 1990s. From the results of the research, the degree to which a species engaged in cooperative breeding showed a correlation to the likelihood of that species displaying altruistic behaviour toward others.
According to Hrdy’s model, early in their evolution humans added cooperative breeding behaviors to their already existing advanced ape cognition, leading to a powerful combination of smarts and sociality that fueled even bigger brains, the evolution of language, and unprecedented levels of cooperation.
It turned out that humans needed to be nice to each other for the most part so that they could survive. For much of human history, there was a lot of cooperation, and much fussing over what kind of behaviour was tolerable in a societal context. This kind of behaviour could help people gain more resources that were not easily found in their respective communities, and people could also muster the strength they need to take down the most violent, dominant guy at the top of the social hierarchy,
Through many such cooperative behaviours, technology and large scale projects like agriculture were able to be carried out, and people could build on the experiences of others who were with them or came before them to improve existing technology, bringing more improvements to their quality of life. Many amazing things we rely on a daily basis, such as electricity and the Internet, came out of such cooperativeness. With the world becoming more globalised and interconnected, we are relying more on each other to fulfil our daily needs. For instance, by ourselves, it is really hard to be able to get food for a nutritionally balanced diet unless we buy and trade things for them with others, for it would be more efficient to grow the foods in the best environments before they would be distributed via the economics of the market and trade. Being totally self-sustainable does not make much sense in today’s world. Like it or not, it is within our best interests to care for and be there for one another.
How about humans being evil innately? There is some evidence for that too
Delroy Paulhus is one of the scientists trying to unravel the evilness of humans. He seeks answers for the question of why people take pleasure in cruelty. Some of the bad personality traits that account for the dark side of people include:
- Narcissism - the incredibly selfish and vain, who may lash out to protect their own sense of self-worth
- Machiavellianism - the cooly manipulative
- Psychopathy - callous insensitivity and immunity to the feelings of others
- Sadism - inflicting pain on others for no other reason than their own pleasure
Observations and questionnaires were done to find out more about these dark traits. A pattern that seemed to emerge over his findings is the need for fulfilling basic desires, such as validating our own beliefs and experiencing pleasure linked to various immoral behaviour.
People who score particularly high on narcissism, for instance, quickly display their tendency to “over-claim” - one of the strategies that helps them boost their own egos. There is a psychological phenomenon that describes that. It has been dubbed the Lake Wobegon Effect after the fictional town where ‘all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average’. Ironically, the least skilled among us are the most prone to overconfidence. Also known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it happens because we do not know enough about a task to accurately assess our ability, and we have not experienced enough about the task to make us have second thoughts about our abilities.
Ignorance and how it takes away the feeling of being socially connected with others is a scary drive. Another case study of basic desires leading to cruel acts are about sadistic people. A bug-crushing experiment revealed that everyday sadists may have more muted emotional responses to all kinds of pleasurable activities, so perhaps their random acts of cruelty are attempts to break through the emotional numbness.
The ego might also account for another cognitive trap that we face often: the action-observer asymmetry. This is how it works: in a situation where a person experiences something negative, the individual will often blame the situation or circumstances. When something negative happens to another person, people will often blame the individual for their personal choices, behaviors, and actions.
One possible reason is that when people are the actors in a situation, they cannot see their own actions. When they are the observers, however, they are easily able to observe the behaviors of other people. Because of this, people are more likely to consider situational forces when attributing their own actions (which they might take more to heart), yet focus on internal characteristics when explaining other people's behaviors. That is why those under this misattribution would feel that everyone and everything else, except for oneself, were wrong.
Other than ignorance and the ego, being able to avoid taking responsibility for one’s own actions could also be another driving force of bad behaviour. The subservience to authority could lead to the doing of cruel acts. This had been an issue that was brought to the public view during war crimes trials such as the perpetrators behind horrific genocides, with some of the most famous examples including the Nuremberg Trials.
Many of those tried, in their defence, had said that they were pressured to do so under orders and they did what they were told in order to survive. Several of the Nazis on trial unsuccessfully attempted to cite Befehlsnotstand, a German legal idea that one was exempt from justice if they committed the acts under orders. However, the law cannot accept that as an excuse. This is hard doctrine, and it is because such a recognition not only would leave the structure of society at the mercy of criminals of sufficient ruthlessness, but also would place the cornerstone of justice on the quicksand of self-interest. Basically, in the wider public interest, self-preservation cannot cover up for one’s immoral actions. It was accepted the way the law should be, no matter how unfair it may sound to some people.
Such a behaviour trait had also been demonstrated through research like what the Milgram experiment sought to do - among the experiment’s participants, who were given the instructions from an authority figure to apply an electric shock to someone, many of them applied the highest voltage, especially when they were not able to see whoever they shocked.
Where should we stand on the fine line between the good and bad?
We know that there is much research showing that humans are predisposed to both sides of the extreme in terms of moral and immoral behaviour. However, we are not helpless. Even in the research, the occurrence of moral and immoral acts were presented as a possibility. It is not a given that we would fall into these experimental scenarios and go by the same behaviour.
Humans are not perfect creatures, and our brains are not the most perfect moral agents, but we can continue to make conscious choices to avoid making lapses in moral judgments and to live as uprightly as we can hope to be.
We have the agency to deliberate our actions, even in situations where we could be under a lot of pressure.
For instance, back to the previous example of Milgram’s experiment, the findings also showed that people’s susceptibility to following instructions from an authority is not inevitable. Resistance to an authority figure is possible. This fact had been reinforced through other studies replicating Milgram’s experiment. Those who resisted prioritised their empathy with the victim more than their loyalty to the instructor, citing that the one receiving electric shocks were in pain, and seemed unconvinced that the instruction was justified.
Another example of this resistance was led to the sparing of the world from a nuclear armageddon. In 1983, during the Cold War, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov decided to dismiss the warning system which detected an American nuclear strike as a false alarm, and did not order a nuclear retaliation, which would be catastrophic for millions of people. It was a costly decision for Petrov. If he had been wrong, and he somehow survived the American nuclear strike, he likely would’ve been executed for treason. Even though he was right, he was, according to the Washington Post’s David Hoffman, “relentlessly interrogated afterward [and] never rewarded for his decision.” From this, we could see that humans could have the capability to not entirely dismiss the greater good for their own self-preservation.
Also, we need a more nuanced view of actions that seem to be hostile or immoral. Delroy Paulhus, while in search of answers explaining humans’ cruelty, was excited about new work on “moral Machiavellianism” and “communal narcissists” – people who perhaps have dark traits but use them for good (as they see it).
In some situations, ruthlessness may be necessary. “To be prime minister, you can’t be namby pamby – you need to cut corners and hurt people, and even be nasty to achieve your moral causes,” he says. After all, the dark personalities often have the impulse and the confidence to get things done –even Mother Teresa apparently had a steely side, he says. “You’re not going to help society by sitting at home being nice.”
This would become more relevant today as we see world leaders mull over tough decisions. To continue with draconian movement restrictions or to risk the proliferation of the virus responsible for an ongoing global pandemic? To preserve the status quo for an immediate improvement in people’s living standards or to curb economic development appropriately to make way for greener policies before the world would be pushed to the brink of collapse by climate change? All of these involved hard decisions and sacrifices. With our resources being so limited, and with so many conflicting self-interests, it is extremely difficult to push our way forward in the midst of all the hubris and come up with a win-win solution.
With so many people telling us what to do, and with much misinformation swamped online, the world would become a better place if people were not too quick to act for issues at the larger societal context, such as race, gender, politics, religion, rights, ex-offenders, cultural groups, et cetera, and would take a moment to think critically and decide how to put their best foot forward and inspire positive change.
It may not be challenging to resist against another person, but what about ourselves, specifically the entrenched intrinsic bias that we were not always aware of? Bias cannot be avoided, we just can't help ourselves. Research shows that we apply different standards when we compare men and women. While explicit discrimination certainly exists, perhaps the more arduous task is to eliminate our implicit biases — the ones we don't even realise we have. However, we can design our means to work around these biases.
In the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras began using blind auditions, which were designed to eliminate bias against women. Candidates are situated on a stage behind a screen to play for a jury that cannot see them. In some orchestras, blind auditions are used just for the preliminary selection while others use it all the way to the end, until a hiring decision is made. Even when the screen is only used for the preliminary round, it has a powerful impact; researchers have determined that this step alone makes it 50% more likely that a woman will advance to the finals. And the screen has also been demonstrated to be the source of a surge in the number of women being offered positions.
Whether we are good or bad beings are not set in stone. Even if we could be defined in some ways by our birth and our genes, our minds are plastic and are capable of changing their personalities and thought patterns. We need more awareness and kindness to understand what is affecting our decisions and use that knowledge to empower ourselves to be a positive influence in other’s lives.
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